A Sense of Doubt blog post #1469 - Imperialism, the myth of "RACE," and GENOCIDE
Hello there...
This is content from my Humanities 351 course at Concordia University in Portland on race, genocide, imperialism, and related topics. The content featured here is two posts from the discussion board, in which some of the content is directed at the student. I left off the names, but you can surely see around that student content for the ideas. It just occurred to me that if I am writing this much that I should cross post it to my blog.
There is a lot to like about your post, as usual. I like the way you write, highly skilled; I like that you added a photo to illustrate one of your ideas; and I love that you have extra source material. Heading into constructing the first essay, these are all signs of excellence and devotion to craft and critical thinking.
I want to key in on your opening comments on race as a place to start further discussions with me and with classmates. I feel like I am back in high school debate, uncovering a fatal fallacy, a false assumption, that yanks the bottom cards out of the house and sends it toppling.
You state that “There are hundreds of different races that live among each other around the world. However, many people back then did not see it this way. They strictly saw only two, black and white,” and yet these things are not true.
Assuming that Wikipedia can be believed on this point – and I feel that it can – as of 20th-century thinking there are FIVE races as defined sociologically.
Granted, the Twentieth Century definition was not in place in the centuries prior: “Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's classification, first proposed in 1779, was widely used in the 19th century, with many variations: the Caucasian race/white race, the Mongolian/yellow race, the American/red race, the Malayan/brown race, the Ethiopian/black race” (“Race_sociology,” “the races,” 1 via Blumenbach).
I don’t mean to call you out specifically, I am sure others in our class have similar assumptions or confusions. But yours jumped out at me, and so I must have a “teaching moment” for you and the rest of the class as these issues are of even more vital importance in the composition of essay one.
Perhaps your assumption about the number of races is simply one of nomenclature because you would be correct if we’re discussing even numbers of nations if not numbers of tribes.
Again, relying on sources that may not be credible, here’s this site:
which estimates about three thousand distinct tribal groups on the African continent. And so surely, counting Asia and the Americas, the number would be probably double that of Africa. And yet, by either the old definitions of the Seventeenth-Eighteenth centuries or the Twentieth, all three thousand tribes belong to one “race,” a designation created sociologically and attempted to be validated scientifically simply to justify racism, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide.
There are no “sub-species” in humanity, no real separate “races” genetically or biologically; there is just one race, the human race.
Ethnicity is a more accurate classification. I like the labels defined by ancestry, and so do most people. As such, African-Americans – the children of slavery who trace roots to Africa – are different than Africans of various ancestry or even those people of Haiti and other nearby locales, though many of these darker skinned people can trace roots to Africa. For that matter, if we believe that all life began in the fertile crescent (where the Garden of Eden was located if existed as something real and not metaphorical), then we are all descendents of Africa. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his prize winning memoir Between the World and Me, “that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence” (6).
By which Coates means that humanity is one giant melting pot, and though many peoples have remained “pure” by engineering marriages and children, others have not, surely Americans, especially given the large numbers of children born from the rape of slaves. And moreover, if we did all originate in Africa, then we all started as “black” and become whiter through adaptation to climate and environment.
ASIDE: There are some theories that purport that we did not all originate in one location and nomadically dispersed but rather that life sprung up in multiple locations around the globe, which would make sense given the vastness of the spread of humanity.
As recently as 2018, Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic in “The New Story of Humanity's Origins in Africa” that humanity began in various locations, though mostly in the African continent.
I know I read an article that suggested part of our species originated, also, in central-south America, but I cannot find any trace of it in a cursory Internet search.
Hey, extra credit to the first one who finds it!
Even Coates writes that “race is the child of racism, not the father” (7), by which he means that “those believing themselves to be white” invented race to justify racism, which is where I was headed with this line of rhetoric.
You also addressed this issue and wrote about how 19th-century science, fueled by Darwin, attempted to justify extermination based on the “natural selection” argument and the natural inferiority of different “races.” You keyed in on the part of Exterminate the Brutes at which I began my reading, starting Part IV, and “The Birth of Racism.” I did not read Lindqvist’s book (not a novel) in a linear fashion. I read Part Four first and then skipped around as led by my interests.
The passage you cite, #118, details Knox’s autopsy of ONE body but from which he draws the conclusion that “race is everything...it stamps the man... depend on it” (125).
You rightly invoke Herbert Spencer, whom Lindqvist cites to trace to its origin Conrad’s use of the phrase “exterminate the brutes” in The Heart of Darkness (which I encourage you all to read along with a review of the film Apocalypse Now that used it as source material).
You write that “Human beings and animals were thought of equal and as an object for extermination by the Europeans. After reading Exterminate All the Brutes, I am pleased that humanity has not had any recent mass genocides and has become more accepting of others.”
Is this true?
Syria?
Yemen?
Aremnia?
Zimbabwe?
Nigeria?
How many people must die for there to be an event we would label as “mass”?
How about America and all the deaths that resulted in the Black Lives Matter campaign.
And is humanity any more accepting today than when?
Incidents of intolerance have gone up since 2016.
You get that this is more of a teaching moment, eh? I am passionate. I get riled up about these subjects. I want to see you all riled up, too.
GET WOKE.
GET ANGRY.
BE THE CHANGE.
But from your perspective it may seem that people are more accepting as by and large your peers are more accepting than ever before. And though the iGen kids exhibit less racist and homophobic ideas, the hate is still in people and often has moved on to ableism, plus-size-bigotry, and more, which you acknowledge:
“Although there is still much hatred, judgement, and resentment, I believe we are moving away from these ideas and false accusations. We are still fighting many conflicts that have emerged in the last century, but I believe we are continually striving to solve some of these problems.”
As you post could have been longer and really is not fully sufficient for our purposes here, despite how well written it is, I wish you had elaborated on those comments and I hope you will in the essay. You may have found your thesis.
True, we have the genome unlocked so we’re no longer trying to prove the genetic inferiority of non-white people, but we’re still a people who fear difference and feel anxiety about the unknown such that we close off, lash out, and from discriminatory bigotry and hatred.
So how will we solve these problems?
In creating a PROBLEM-SOLUTION thesis for essay one, you have boiled down the essence of one of our main ideas in this course. Now can you extend that idea to its natural conclusion and derive a thesis with a topic-driven essay map for your essay?
Whew!! Writing this much to one person (and the whole class) means that I might not get two-four posts written today.
Still, all in all Sydney, this is very well written material with good use of the source, though brief.
Peace,
chris
PS: Exterminate All The Brutes is not a “novel”; it’s a work of non-fiction, classified as part of the genre history and African Studies particularly.
REFS
The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Google Books.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Penguin Random House. 2015.
Yong, Ed. “The New Story of Humanity's Origins in Africa
Several new discoveries suggest that our species didn’t arise from a single point in space. Instead, the entire continent was our cradle.” The Atlantic. July 11, 2018.
From -
NOTE: I hope you forgive me in not holding myself to the same standard as I hold you in citation and reference of sources. I do not use MLA form and I am sloppy. But then, my goal is to write 7-8 responses in the next few days and yours is to write at least two plus your main post. Not an excuse, maybe not fair, but I wanted to be transparent. Do not model your citation methodology on my examples. HOWEVER, as point of order, we should ALL USE MLA FORM, which would not require publication dates for in-text cites, just authors and page numbers (or some locator).
Great photos and a fine post, though I see places in which you could develop ideas more thoroughly, such as the point you are making in which Lindqvist shares about Spencer or the argument made about natural selection and genocide, justification for slaughter. Your follow up analysis and commentary on both points is rudimentary and skeletal.
You write: “We still see people of color struggle within our society to gain equal footing to their white counterparts.”
I contend that
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #371 - I am not afraid of the police; but maybe you should be
Black people, mostly black men, are being killed in large numbers on our streets, sitting in their cars, walking home from the store to bring mama some OJ.
I am not afraid for my life when pulled over by the police, but I would be if I was a black man. Ta-nehisi Coates who wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his son spent much of the text warning his son to protect his body because as a black man in a “system that makes your body breakable” (18). Coates speaks of no escape from a system that wants to hurt him, “cost me my body,” being too violent or not violent enough, both, could cost him.
It’s costing people nationwide.
Nationwide, police shot and killed nearly 1,000 people in 2017
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| "Omega Glory" Star Trek Original Series |
FROM -
POLICE KILLING OF BLACKS: Data for 2015, 2016, 2017, and first half of 2018
Todd Beer on March 1, 2018
Updated August 24, 2018
“Blacks are over-represented among all those killed by police under all circumstances... in 2017, 23% of all those killed by police. In other words, Blacks were the victims of the lethal use of force by police at nearly twice their rate in the general population...For the first half of 2018, Blacks make up 20% of all those killed by police under all conditions.”
And that’s just one genocide. What about “crime”? What about drugs? What about homelessness? What about lack of healthcare? Lack of care for veterans? What about all the invisible means extermination?
According to Shavers & Shavers in “Racism and Health Inequity among Americans,” a disproportionate amount of the advertising money spent promoting tobacco and related products targeted specifically minority communities. “Approximately, 60% of advertising in African-American newspapers are tobacco advertisements” (391).
The hegemony, the dominant culture, is still trying to exterminate the groups it has pushed to the margins and kept in the ghettos and barrios.
Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for the book Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1997 for a national best selling history book (also not a novel) “demolishing the grounds for racist theories of history” (Paul Ehrlich, back cover). He writes about haves and have nots and the power of civilization found in agriculture, which he has also written about as the “worst mistake of human history” (see attached).
He examines what he calls “Yali’s question,” which has to do with why in the 13,000 years since the last ice age, some peoples in some parts of the world developed industrial, agricultural societies with metal tools while others retained the hunter-gatherer ways of their ancestors (13).
“ Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel).
I know it’s a cheat to dump a chunk of a Wikipedia page and then not even cite it correctly, but I am in a hurry to finish this post as I am fading. Maybe I will come back and edit when I am feeling better.
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| https://funnytimes.com/42347/ |
I commend you for citing Paul Rohrbach’s book German Thought in the World (1912) via Lindqvist (page 151), which not coincidentally is right on the eve of World War One in which the Germans attempted their own extermination part one (part two being WWII) as they imposed their “blood and iron” destiny as heralded by Otto Von Bismarck in 1862 on the rest of Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Iron_(speech)).
Their will imposed as Machtpolitik ("Power politics").
Rohrbach echoed this same colonialist (the nice way of saying imperialist) philosophy of extermination as against that of the “higher race,” which is clearly the white race in general.
But what else can we say of this idea beyond what I just did with the connections to history and all of human history as in Diamond’s book.
How should we regard today our legacy and our shame at the actions of our ancestors? Or at least some of our ancestors, right?
Is looking too closely at this stuff making you angry?
It is making me angry.
-chris
REF
attached - Diamond, Jared. “The Worst Mistake in Human History.”
Discover Magazine. May 1987. Pgs. 64-66.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Penguin Random House. 2015.
Shavers, Vickie & Shavers, Brenda. “Racism and Health Inequity among Americans.”Journal of the National Medical Association. Vol. 98, no. 3 March 2006. Pgs. 386-396.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1902.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1334 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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